COMPANY SERVES LUNCH TO THOSE SERVING TIME.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

LANCASTER - Nine million times a year, state prison inmates bite into lunches assembled by workers at a downtown Lancaster company.

In a building that once housed a meat company run by its president's father and uncles, Harvest Farms' white-coated workers put bread, lunch meat, a cookie or two, a powdered-drink packet, chips and an apple in a cardboard tray and seal it in plastic. The meals - 32,000 a day - are then trucked to prisons throughout California.

``We set ourselves up in a niche market with the correctional industry,'' said Harvest Farms President George Callas, whose company works out of the same downtown building where his father and uncles ran Callas Meats from the 1940s into the early 1980s.

The prison focus was Callas' response to California's long and deep 1990s recession, which hit hard at restaurants and Harvest Farm's other traditional customers from Los Angeles to Fresno.

Callas looked around and decided prisons were an untapped market. Prisons nationally were already starting to outsource their kitchens - bringing in private companies to prepare meals under contract.

Callas convinced prison officials that his USDA-inspected food processing plant could produce lunches under more sanitary conditions and with less wasted or pilfered food than in prison kitchens, where crews of hardened inmates prepared the meals.

``They had a yield problem,'' said Callas, who was a certified public accountant practicing in Los Angeles before returning to Lancaster to run the business. ``They had major health concerns.''

Now with nearly 100 employees, Harvest Farms supplies packaged, ready-to-serve lunches to seven state prisons, from Lancaster to Butte County, as well as to other institutions like the Terminal Island federal prison and the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department jails.

Oregon is evaluating the company's products for its state prison.

The company also sells food products like prepackaged lunch meat and acts as a distributor for other companies' wares to nonprison customers including the Long Beach Unified School District, restaurants and food wholesalers.

``We've even supplied extras in the motion picture industry,'' Callas said.

Harvest Farm's lunches are working out fine at California State Prison- Los Angeles County in Lancaster, where the company was hired as a more efficient way to get lunches out to inmates, one prison official said.

``I know when I pick up a case of lunches I've got 30 lunches in it,'' said Mark Howard, assistant correctional food manager at the prison.

When inmates assembled lunches, too much food disappeared, Howard said.

``It's easy to put a handful in your pocket,'' he said.

Prison officials can pick the meals off a 70-item menu of lunch meats, cheese, cookies, chips, breads, fruits and drink mixes, usually varying the meals weekly.

Harvest Farms has also produced a special meal for Ramadan, the Islamic holy month during which Muslims must fast from sunrise to sunset. Because Muslims eat only one meal a day during Ramadan, the package is filled with hard-boiled eggs, dates, a special pastry, bread and fruit.

The lunch meats are all poultry, prepared by Foster Farms using Harvest Farms recipes. Other ingredients come from other suppliers, like golden delicious apples from a Washington state cooperative.

The prison lunches stick to chicken and turkey because poultry doesn't run into religious prohibitions like pork and beef do, Callas said. The poultry is processed into ham, bologna and salami that tastes like beef and pork.

``If you didn't see it on a label that it was a poultry-based meat, you wouldn't know,'' Callas said.

Callas' goals for the company are to expand to other prisons outside California and to other institutions feeding large numbers of people, like schools.

``We could even create an airline meal,'' Callas said. ``It could lend itself to that.''